Big Bend protects a desert landscape that tends to be described with terms like: barren, waste, wasteland, a-whole-lot-of-nothing. In our first twenty-four hours in the park, we met: a bobcat, a ground-owl, jackrabbits, raccoon, bluebirds, mice, bumble bees, two bear, countless deer; sotol & yucca with flowers ten feet tall, cholla, ocotillo, mesquite, juniper. In the free fenceless desert, life overflowed. There is no such thing as a waste land! (John Locke be damned!) Every living thing we saw was thriving exactly where it was. The desert is not a place where life evaporates before the pale sandy face of death, in some horrible death-sunshine, it's where "life on earth" shows its true extent: The Whole Earth. The world isn't empty, it's full! //South Rim, Big Bend National Park, Texas
The Zodiac, Eagles Nest Wilderness, Colorado // The most spiritual places on earth were not made by any hands, they were here before we were.
Red Peak, Eagles Nest Wilderness, Colorado // Mountains always have a different character when you get up close. What you lose in towering massive silence you gain in an explosion of detail and variety: jagged peaks revealing themselves as precarious piles of rock, being held up by the magic inevitability of the angle of repose. From a distance it almost seems impossible. How could something so massive, so solid be so complex, so chaotic? How can such obvious order be so illusory? I suppose it's just like human nature to miss the rocks for the mountains.
